You may want to paste a vignetted, colorized map onto a completely different background, as we did for the intro screens of the View Catalog supplied with this sample map. For this, we used an Artbeats® “Marble & Granite” background, as follows:
1. Colorize your map the way you want. We gave the ocean floor approximately the same color as the background we intended using.
 
2. Double-click on the Lasso tool in the Toolbox to display the Lasso Options dialog box. Define a suitable Feather Radius. We used 10 pixels.
3. Using the Lasso tool, draw round the area of the map that you want to appear in your final image.
4. Choose “Save Selection” from the “Select” menu. A new channel will be created, called “#4,” although the combined RGB channel will still be visible. Take a look at the channel you just created by clicking on “#4” in the Channels palette. It will look a little like this:
 
The black areas act as a mask for the map, with anything you paste into it only appearing in the white areas. But because we want to paste a background into the map, we need the black and white areas of this channel to be the other way round.
If necessary, adjust the size of your map image by using “Image Size,” then“Canvas Size,” in the “Image” menu. Our background marble image was 640 x 480 pixels, so to make our map image fit comfortably, we first reduced the map 85% using “Image Size,” then increased the canvas size to 640 x 480 pixels. This left a white border around the feathered mask, which we filled with the foreground color (black) using the Paint Bucket tool.
5. Remove the “marching ants” by choosing “None” from the “Select” menu. Choose “Map > Invert” from the “Image” menu. Go back to the RGB channel.
6. Choose “Load Selection” from the “Select” menu.
7. Make a note of the dimensions of your image, in pixels. Get this information by holding down the Option key while clicking in the box at lower left of the image window.
8. Open the document that you want to use for the background.
9. Select an area at least the size of your map image. You can make a very precise selection by double-clicking on the rectangular marquee tool in the Toolbox, checking the “Fixed Size” button in the Rectangular Marquee Options dialog box, and finally entering the dimensions of your map image, as noted in step 7. The rectangular marquee tool will now select a fixed size when you click on the background image.
10. Choose “Copy” from the “Edit” menu. Close the background document window.
11. Make your map image window active, if it isn”t already, by clicking on the window title bar.
12. Choose “Paste Into” from the “Edit” menu. The background will now appear behind your map selection, merging into it.
 
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